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Sebring has long been a magnet for the world's top drivers, including Graham Hill and Jackie Stewart. Here, Hill and Stewart share a Ford GT40 ride in 1966. Photo by LAT PHOTOGRAPHIC

Feature: 12 Hours of Sebring comes full circle for 60th anniversary

March 11, 2012

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Editor's note:This is the first in a four-part Autoweek series commemorating the history of the 12 Hours of Sebring, which on March 17 celebrates its 60th-anniversary race. Check back each day this week leading up to Saturday's American Le Mans Series/World Endurance Challenge season opener for a new installment. And be sure to check out our separate countdown of the 20 greatest Sebring battles of all time. We'll reveal four each day through Friday, when we'll arrive at No. 1.

It is appropriate that the FIA World Endurance Championship will kick off with the 12 Hours of Sebring on March 17. After all, the event, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, was inspired by the race at the heart of the new series--the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Alec Ulmann, a Russian-born aeronautical engineer and one of 200 founding members of the Sports Car Club of America, loved endurance racing in general and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in particular. Ulmann's business in surplus aircraft took him to a number of former military airfields, including Hendricks Field--a former B-17 Flying Fortress training base just down the road from Sebring, Fla., that would become his company's headquarters. Its broad runways and network of access roads, he reckoned, would provide the ideal starting point for a road course on which to host a Le Mans-style endurance competition.

The first event at what became Sebring International Raceway took place at the end of 1950. The race was a low-key affair, but it tipped its hat to Le Mans: It ran for six hours, and the drivers ran across the track to their cars at the start.

Fifteen months later, in 1952, the 12 Hours was born in its traditional mid-March slot. Thirty-two cars started the race on a 5.2-mile circuit bordered by hay bales and oil drums. The entry list had an international flavor right from the start: a British Frazer Nash Le Mans replica driven by Larry Kulok and Harry Grey won, while a French Deutsch-Bonnet claimed the Index of Performance trophy modeled on the same award given at Le Mans each year.

Ulmann, not surprisingly, pushed for Sebring's inclusion in the World Sportscar Championship organized for the following season. The new series took the classic sports-car races--Le Mans, the Mille Miglia, the 24 Hours of Spa, the Tourist Trophy and the Carrera Panamericana--and combined them with a couple of classics in the making, the Nürburgring 1000 KM and the 12 Hours of Sebring.

Stirling Moss was a star at Sebring in the 1950s and '60s. Photo by LAT PHOTOGPRAPHIC

Sebring's inclusion in the inaugural world championship for sports cars, which in various guises ran continuously until 1992, set the tone for the race. There have been ups and downs, but it has always been regarded as one of the most important endurance races in the world.

The lineup aboard the winning Cunningham-Chrysler C4R in 1953 included American driver John Fitch, who had raced at Le Mans and later that year would make his Grand Prix debut. Subsequent big-name winners in the 1950s and '60s included Stirling Moss, Mike Hawthorn, Juan Manuel Fangio, Peter Collins, Phil Hill, Dan Gurney, John Surtees and Lloyd Ruby. Jaguar, Ferrari, Maserati and Porsche all triumphed through those years.

Sebring was an integral part of the world-championship calendar through the 1960s and the early '70s. The race, however, appeared to be on borrowed time as the track facilities stagnated. The FIA's then-sporting arm, the CSI, pushed for facility upgrades while Ulmann searched for an alternative venue.

Ulmann announced that the 1972 race would be the final 12 Hours of Sebring. It was, indeed, the final Sebring contest to hold world-championship status before the 2012 event, but it wasn't the last 12 Hours. The fledgling IMSA organization stepped in to take over the event and started another rich chapter in its history.

IMSA hit a high mark in the GTP prototype era of late 1980s and early '90s when Porsche, Jaguar, Nissan, Toyota and Chevrolet battled for honors at Sebring and through the Camel-sponsored series. Again, a roster of big names triumphed in the race: Bobby Rahal, Hans Stuck, Arie Luyendyk and Andy Wallace all made it to victory lane.

The adoption of IMSA's World Sports Car category as the basis of the new breed of prototypes racing at Le Mans beginning in the mid-1990s brought an international flavor back to Florida. That was multiplied when Don Panoz took over the lease at the venue and made the 12 Hours the opening round of his American Le Mans Series in 1999.

BMW, Audi and Peugeot have all won at Sebring with cars designed to win at Le Mans. For manufacturers chasing sports-car racing's biggest prize, it became a must-do event, even before the 2010 creation of the Intercontinental Le Mans Cup.

That series spawned the WEC, and now the oldest of the U.S. enduros is once again rightfully on a world-championship calendar.